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7 Speeches, All in One Place

By Ben Werschkul January 23, 2007 9:44 pmJanuary 23, 2007 9:44 pm

Taken together, President Bush’s seven State of the Union messages add up to nearly 35,000 words. Which words show up all the time? Which ones are conspicuously absent? Use our new tool to search all seven speeches simultaneously and see how the words stack up. Here’s one example: In 2002, the president mentioned Iraq a grand total of….. two times. Tonight, he used the word 34 times. You can go ahead and chart how often he said Iraq through the years.

So now it’s all bipartisanship and moderation. Where was that when Republicans were in power in the House and Senate? While it’s nice to hear, I very much doubt the sincerity of his sudden ‘reconversion’ from partisanship.

Other than that, it was a pretty good speech. Lets see if it gets followed up on, especially the part about decreasing our oil dependence by increasing our funding for renewable and green energy sources.

I would like to see the number of “we need to” and “we must” phrases in comparison with other president’s State of the Union addresses. Can you imagine this president’s address to the nation if he was not allowed to use speech-writers?

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